Spreedly Blog

Opening a business to the public is a lot like bringing a child in to the world: you never feel ready, you know you’re signing up for years of hard work, and in retrospect it’s so worth it. To stretch the analogy a little further it turns out having pets, i.e. being in closed beta, doesn’t really prepare you for being a parent (though it can help out a bit). All that to say that we’ve thrown the doors to Spreedly wide open! No more invite required, you can sign up and start playing with a test account at your leisure. Like what you see? Upgrade to a paying account and you’re all set to start tracking subscriptions and making real money.

At this point we’re elated, we’re scared, and we’re motivated in a new way to improve, polish, extend, simplify and generally make Spreedly the most amazing subscription management platform ever. We’ve got a task list a mile long filled with things we want to do to make the service better, and we’re especially looking forward to feedback from new clients to help us prioritize our efforts over the coming months. It’s going to be a fun ride, and we’re glad to let everybody on board!

Exciting news: one of our Spreedly early adopters is developing a WordPress plugin to allow the selling of subscription content on an existing WordPress site. It will allow anyone currently using WordPress to add a “subscription wall” that some of their content is behind, and then charge people for access to that premium content.

We’re super-excited about this development, as we believe that WordPress’ legendary ease of publishing combined with Spreedly’s simple subscription setup will enable a lot of new people to dip their toe’s in the premium content market. We’ll definitely be posting a follow-up here when an initial version of the plugin is ready!

You might look at Spreedly and think, “Wow, they’re going up against some big competitors! How will they ever survive?” But we have a secret weapon that the big companies just can’t match: we’re small and lean and can respond to our clients at a rapid rate. For instance, we’re paying close attention to the feedback we’re getting from our latest round of invitees, and while we’ve queued some requests for later, in two cases we’ve rolled out an enhancement within 24 hours of receiving the request. To give you a peek in to the process, lets walk through the timeline of one of those…

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Julian Migura of Galaxy News got in touch with the Spreedly team last week and asked if we’d do an interview with him about Spreedly, and I jumped at the opportunity. If you’re not familiar with it, Galaxy News is a major source of news and info for online game creators, especially in its German-language edition, so it was great to fill the readers in on all the Spreedly details. The best part of the interview, though, is that it’s not really gaming specific, so go have a read to get another perspective on what Spreedly’s all about.

There are lots of highs one hits when starting a new software business: settling on the name, seeing the first version up and running on the staging server, getting featured in a publication, signing investment on, and many more. But there’s one high that takes the cake in my opinion, and that’s the feeling you get once the service is real and real clients can start signing up and using it. While Spreedly has been handling subscriptions for real sites since October of last year, we’ve just sent out a batch of invites that will increase our client base 10x. Needless to say, we’re psyched!

So why invites? Why not just open the doors to the general public? Well, one of the interesting things about Spreedly is that it’s a platform upon which many different types of businesses will build. Because of that, we want to get at least one more round of feedback under our belts before going to general availability so we can make sure there aren’t any gaping holes in the offering. No matter how smart we are, we’re sure that the next round of users are going to make the service 10x better.

A quick example of this in action: we learned in an earlier round of new clients that using the Paypal sandbox was a huge hindrance to getting started with Spreedly. So we went back to the drawing board and implemented our own sandbox, with the result being a built-in, incredibly easy to use test site for each client. And now our new invitees will have a great initial Spreedly experience instead of mucking around in Paypal, which is totally worth the gradual growth to date.

So, if you’re one of the recent invitees, please do drop us an email at support@spreedly.com with any feedback – we want to hear from you! If you’re not an invitee but want to be one if we do another round of invites, head over to http://spreedly.com and add your name to the list. We can’t wait for you to get a chance to sign up and check it out!

First of all, if you’re interested in starting a company (or helping someone else start a company) and you haven’t read Getting Real from 37signals, you have to go do that now. It packs in so many important thought processes, pitfalls to avoid, tips, tricks and other goodness that it’s simply one of the most important entrepreneurial (and business) books written this century. And you have no excuse not to read it, since it’s available completely for free!

If you have read Getting Real, what’s your favorite part? Believe it or not, I think my favorite part is actually the title! The words “getting real” so beautifully capture what a healthy startup feels like: the joy comes not from the planning or the designing or the coding or the marketing, but rather from the combination of all of those activities that allows us to quickly deliver something real and concrete in to the hands of real users. And of course it’s not “get real” but rather “getting real”, which communicates the constant, incremental delivery of value rather than an all at once, “do it and you’re done” release.

Here at Spreedly, we’re ecstatic about setting up real clients on our now very real platform and starting to tell the world about the truly exciting things we have to offer. Getting this blog up is yet another piece of the puzzle that contributes to that momentum, and we can’t wait to keep you up on the latest as we continue this process of getting real. Grab yourself a subscription and hang on – it’s going to be a fun, wild ride!